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Why $2 billion startup GitHub is apparently in crisis, again
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Date: February 5th, 2016 12:01 AM Author: Idiotic mad-dog skullcap really tough guy http://www.businessinsider.com/github-identity-crisis-2016-2
GitHub's internal culture seems to be melting down.
A struggle between factions is taking place, according to a report by The Information, which matches what several sources have told Business Insider.
On the one side are top executives who want to grow the company's revenues by landing big enterprise contracts, with all the suit-and-tie salesforce culture that typically requires.
On the other are the employees who prefer GitHub's roots as a meritocracy with an informal management structure and a lot less red tape.
Nine executives have jumped ship in recent months including, as we previously reported, VP of Engineering Susan Lally, who had been with the company 18 months.
The enterprise golden goose GitHub is a hugely popular service that lets programmers store their software projects, share their projects publicly, and get others to collaborate with them on it. It's also increasingly the place where programmers show off their skills to prospective employers.
It's become so important to its 13 million users that if GitHub goes down, the software development world practically stops. In fact, on Wednesday, GitHub posted a lengthy and public apology to explain what happened during a well-publicized two-hour outage of the site two weeks ago.
GitHub has raised $350 million, and was valued at about $2 billion with the $250 million investment is landed last year. It had previously raised $100 million in 2012 from Andreessen Horowitz, a record-breaking investment from that powerhouse VC at the time.
As popular as GitHub is, many of its developers can use it for free, or pay a small monthly fee. They are not the real golden goose for the company. The big money comes from enterprise contracts.
The company has reportedly always been cash-flow positive, and is expected to bring in more than $25 million this quarter, which puts it on track for more than $100 million annual revenue.
However, to grow into the multi-billion company its VCs dream of, it's been increasingly pursuing enterprise customers.
It sells a service that allows corporate teams of software developers to privately work on their projects together, without sharing that code with the rest of the world.
This has apparently become the battle ground.
Enterprise sales are a completely different beast than consumer freebie sales.
Big enterprise software contracts can take months or longer to secure and often require hand-holding, which is where hiring a sales force comes in. Enterprises often want assurances of uptime that carry legal or financial penalties, they need certain features for security and for accountability, and they often want the ability their suppliers to have met certain audits and standards for security, operations and so on.
Even huge companies like Amazon and Google have struggled with this as they sell their cloud services to enterprises. So have companies like Dropbox and Evernote.
The development community has recently noticed that GitHub had changed its focus. A bunch of active and influential users sent it an open letter in January called "Dear GitHub," in which they asked GitHub to work on its product for them, and add a bunch of features.
GitHub promised to take notice and work on those features.
Corporate clash
But, internally, employees' feelings were also getting ruffled, some told the Information.
As the company has grown to nearly 500 employees, it has tried to change cultures and impose an old-fashioned hierarchy. One employee told The Information "This person who used to be your peer is now your manager."
That didn't go over well, this person said.
This isn't the first issue GitHub has had with its corporate culture. Co-founder Chris Wanstrath took over as CEO in 2014 after accusations of harassment by a female employee in the workplace led Tom Preston-Werner to resign.
GitHub later said an internal investigation did not find evidence of sexual harassment but of other missteps by Preston-Werner. Preston-Werner's wife later posted a public apology for making employees of GitHub feel pressured to help her with her nonprofit startup.
Growing competition
In the meantime, GitHub's rivals are taking advantage of its growing pains. It's biggest rival, Atlassian, has grown into a profitable company with over $300 million in revenues and 1,400 employees worldwide. All of this without ever going down GitHub's path and hiring an enterprise sales force. And it recently had a very successful IPO.
The market is also attracting little upstarts like GitLab who are trying to cash in on GitHub’s missteps, and having some success with that, too.
GitHub declined comment for this article. |
Date: February 7th, 2016 4:52 PM Author: Turquoise Stage Roast Beef lol @ gen-x's obsession with "diversity." they're taking it even further than their baby boomer overlords. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29773998) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 10:32 PM Author: Idiotic mad-dog skullcap really tough guy yea tons of diversity at github. 99% of the company is white. though they do have some "w0myn in t3ch" sprinkled in for good measure (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29777276) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:55 PM Author: elite poppy therapy area I had no idea GitHub was even a company. Thought it was just a free software foundation thing. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774013) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:56 PM Author: naked exciting church how do they even make money? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774020) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:56 PM Author: elite poppy therapy area don't know (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774024) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:58 PM Author: Crusty silver travel guidebook keepsake machete (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774048) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:05 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge Think of the contracts as just subscriptions. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774105) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:05 PM Author: walnut cumskin abode Volume. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774108) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:16 PM Author: contagious university Their revenue is only 100 million a year. That's nothing for a company their size. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774187) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:17 PM Author: Ultramarine Sanctuary Pervert from reading the article it sounds like they sell premium enterprise services to software companies (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774193) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:31 PM Author: diverse dingle berry each dev has to pay $7/month to be able to use private repositories (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774309) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 10:30 PM Author: soggy cuckold I believe this was before he was president. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29777266) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:19 PM Author: Bossy national headpube Git is the free thing.
Github is basically a cloud server that stores the repos. It's the easiest fucking thing in the world to duplicate, and no company who does this should be worth more than $100mm. |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:20 PM Author: Ultramarine Sanctuary Pervert All this shit is easy to duplicate. The value is in being the first mover. Facebook is not exactly some cutting edge technology. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774220) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:25 PM Author: Bossy national headpube You misinterpret 'easy'. But it's cool that you vaguely know what some SV buzzwords mean. It's damn near impossible to get billions of people to engage in a soical platform. Though it was easy to make the web site (up until they did all the photo hosting). There are zero lock-in effects and zero network effects with git hosting services like github. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774268) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:36 PM Author: Ultramarine Sanctuary Pervert Um, why not? Github is the website where ppl can collaborate on their projects, isn't it? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774346) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:42 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge There are too many moving parts to it to write it off as easy. Not impossible, but not easy. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774378) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:48 PM Author: Bossy national headpube Git manages the interaction part. Not github. And each repo is a small, confined network. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774422) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:49 PM Author: Ultramarine Sanctuary Pervert So.. The value in github is that everyone uses it....? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774430) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:52 PM Author: Bossy national headpube Well, people use bitbucket and private networks. I think Microsoft has some Azure thing.
The value of Github is that a bunch of jews know how to make it sound special, so they can pump and dump it into a pension fund. |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:56 PM Author: Crusty silver travel guidebook keepsake machete (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774025) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 4:57 PM Author: naked exciting church 500 peers just doing whatever they want to do, ljl. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774035) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:22 PM Author: Bossy national headpube i.e. the law firm business model. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774233) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:04 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge This is the kind of stuff that happens when you're cocky enough to build a replica of the Oval Office at your headquarters. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774100) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:07 PM Author: Multi-colored alcoholic weed whacker I think it was just a rug imitating the Oval Office seal, not a replica of the Oval Office
Edit: I'm wrong |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:09 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge Eh close enough: https://d1l6lhgof63zdh.cloudfront.net/github-office-EhUSkdtu6j.jpg (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774131) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:11 PM Author: Turquoise Stage Roast Beef that actually looks like glenn beck's oval office studio thing that he uses during shows. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774148) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:12 PM Author: Multi-colored alcoholic weed whacker Holy shit (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774157) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:10 PM Author: Crusty silver travel guidebook keepsake machete (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774138) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:11 PM Author: Multi-colored alcoholic weed whacker That link got posted to r/linux and there was a lot of good discussion. Then the link got removed, along with another thread questioning why the link got removed. So there's a gigantic discussion about censorship on that sub. The mods seem to be claiming that some automated moderation tool removed the link... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774152) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:13 PM Author: Crusty silver travel guidebook keepsake machete (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774165) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:16 PM Author: Ultramarine Sanctuary Pervert I always thought Github was some kind of nonprofit/open source type shit (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774181) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:17 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge bytes add up. gotta pay for them somehow. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774194) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:20 PM Author: Multi-colored alcoholic weed whacker Git is an open source software tool for managing source code
GitHub is a company that hosts source code repositories and lets people interact with them with Git |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:24 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge If only you didn't need the hub part. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774250) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:34 PM Author: stimulating fear-inspiring idea he suggested cr (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774338) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:23 PM Author: contagious university It's funny how all these forum neckbeards hate SJW types, yet almost all of the top tier programmers are complete shitlibs. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774240) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:38 PM Author: Crusty silver travel guidebook keepsake machete (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774364) |
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Date: February 7th, 2016 5:41 PM Author: dull exhilarant lodge Cr. Money skews your perception of the world, regardless if you are a lib or a conservative. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3118936&forum_id=2#29774374) |